Luke 6:48 - "...he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built."
Tonight, my son and I are going to a fund-raiser, here in Birmingham, Alabama, for Greg and Melissa Segrest. Greg has accepted a post with Amor ministries in San Diego, California. Greg's job each week will be to lead American church groups into Mexico, just outside the city of Tijuana. The groups will sleep on the ground for four or five nights and have extremely primitive kitchen and bath realities so they can share the privilege of building two or three, carport-sized houses in a week. Each house will provide shelter for one of the forty-seven percent of Mexican families that live below the poverty line. A house keeps a poor family together physically, just as the Bible they're given keeps them together spiritually.
Greg and Melissa, in essence, are becoming missionaries to a foreign country, though they will live in our country. Greg, like most missionaries, must raise his own support, which is $36,000 for 2014. Yesterday, with a brief appeal, our little church gathered $4,920 for Greg, with another $1,800 pledged by members for the year ahead, in addition to our church's budget commitment. It's a blessed start. However, there's a long way still to go. If you'd like to support this young couple in their life commitment to bringing Jesus and the Gospel to those in dire need, you can either send a tax-deductible gift to Amor directly (www.amor.org/give), noting that it's for Greg, or you can send a tax-deductible gift to our church (Christ the King Lutheran, 611 Riverchase Pkwy W, Birmingham, AL 35244), noting it for Greg. Every single penny will go to Greg's mission support.
Additionally, if you want to know how to build your children into young missionaries, whether they build houses in Mexico, work on computers in Huntsville, AL, serve on the police force in Kingsport, TN, aspire to be African or Nepalese or Middle-Eastern missionaries after college, or still don't know exactly what God wants them to do, then here are four simple directions for building the house, which is your child's life, with a foundation that is dug deep down onto the rock so their life can withstand any flood or storm and their life can build up others in Christ's strength, too.
1) Lay the foundation for your child(ren) with God's word, namely the writings "of the apostles and prophets, [with] Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone." (Ephesians 2:20)
2) Then working up from the foundation, use your knees and work on your child(ren)'s knees too . As Larry Christenson once said in "God's Little Instruction Book for Dad," "Happy is the child who happens in upon his parent from time to time to see them on their knees,...or going aside regularly, to keep times with the Lord."
3) Working on up the body, build your child with your own big big heart and fill theirs too. It's been said that when God measures a man, he puts the tape around the heart instead of the head.
4) Finally, the first three roll up and are revealed by a trained or untrained tongue. As Paul Lewis says, "A father's words are like a thermostat that sets the temperature in the house."
Please pray for Greg and Melissa's new life, for every child-building adult, and for all children to be built up with God's words.
Praise God!
Pastor Chris
"The gospel is the story of Jesus [what God's only Son has done for us that we can't do for ourselves], spoken as a promise." - Robert Jenson
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